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Tuesday, 30 July 2013

Touron

Exactly half of our 話す・聴く
classes involved the teacher distributing a passage
from a Japanese-language book on Japanese culture, everyone reading
over it in the intervening week, and then coming together to share
impressions in the next class. Given the cultural angle, they were
mostly on dryly factual topics such as 有り合わせ
(rummaging through the fridge and jury-rigging dinner
out of whatever happens to be in there) and Japanese religious
customs (they're Shintou-Buddhists in practice but atheists at
heart), which, while interesting, don't exactly lend themselves well
to spirited debate. Most of the rest of the time we worked off a
video, but sometimes we did something completely different. One day,
for example, the teacher brought in some printouts from a Business
Japanese textbook, and we talked about where everybody sits in a taxi
and why it's unbecoming to answer 「スミスさん、もう仕事慣れました？」
with 「いやぁ、まじやばいっす！」。

And then a little while ago we did
what's called a 討論
touron. This
was a new term for me, but it means a group discussion with the goal
of arriving at a consensus, and it's apparently a common section of
the job interview process – throw a handful of hopefuls at each
other and see who the most effective communicators are. We were split
into two groups, each of which would have a turn, after which the
other would choose a single “winner.” The teacher advised us to
keep in mind a few critical points, the most salient of which was
that everybody should, individually, be doing more listening than
talking. Obviously in groups of four this just makes mathematical
sense, but I knew immediately that this was going to be a challenge
for me. In my experience, Western culture takes a more congenially
adversarial approach to debate, meaning that being a polite and
skillful interlocutor is not about acknowledging the probable
veracity of all opposing arguments, but rather about systematically
annihilating all opposing arguments while not being an asshole about
it. This gets back to a point I wrote about earlier: In summary,
English communication is transitive, Japanese communication is
receptive.

Despite
this, I immediately took the helm, simply because, despite evidence
to the contrary, I am pretty damn alpha in most situations. It's not
like this is exactly a foreign atmosphere for me; being Vice
President of my Canadian university's Japanese Club taught me how to
run a meeting, how to manage time, how to summarize and proceed, and
how to know when to let people get off topic and when to gather them
back in. To be honest, I had a little bit of a plan, which mainly
involved taking control right away, because I knew that once I had
it, maintaining it would be easy. The teacher had mentioned that
another thing to be conscious of was who had shown the most
“leadership” in the touron, so to open things up I pulled a trick
out of my Background in Philosophy bag and asked that we define our
terms: Our topic was “what limitations should be put on children
using the Internet,” so I asked, Until what age, for the purposes
of this discussion, do we consider someone a child? We quickly agreed
to define a “child” as elementary school-aged. All having
accepted this definition, I sprung my first trap, such as it was,
suggesting that surely nobody thinks that we should ban children from
using the Internet entirely,
so we can then work from that baseline?

I was
assuming, of course, that nobody would, which was the basis for my
entire outline, in which I intended to gradually add limitations and
caveats to the mixture until we had arrived at a reasonable
conclusion. My mistake was in thinking that most people would agree
with me. I was of the
opinion that, in this technology-centric Information Age of ours,
children should be allowed to use the Internet almost without
restriction, basically excepting only pornography, dangerous
liaisons, and blatant misinformation. This was pretty stupid, and I
should really have planned for the possibility of somebody going the
other way, because, as it happened, all of them did. Right from the
start, I had to throw away my whole plan.

The
only person who actually noticed my misstep was the teacher himself,
and he found it hilarious,
just because he imagined my internal reaction to be one of scrambling
to find a new angle, with my original idea in ruins and nothing to
fall back on. Know what though, that really wasn't the case. I took
the hit and moved on, formulating a new plan on the fly and running
with it. I think I actually deserve credit
for that, if anything. Rather than fumbling and folding, I affirmed
grace under pressure. That's a desirable skill in a prospective
employee, wouldn't you say?

Funny
enough, my initial failure even worked to my advantage, as while
easily persuading them to my point of view would have left everybody
with little to say, and pure domination would have made me look quite
inconsiderate, we were instead able to talk things through and hammer
out an understanding. In fact, they convinced me,
which is certainly uncommon. It actually turned out to be a genuinely
interesting discussion, which was quite pleasant, and certainly
better than can be said of the other group, which just talked in
circles around each other. I'd thought fifteen minutes would stretch
into eternity, but it flew by. Everybody found my overly Japanese
declarations of 「なるほど」and
「はい、分かりました」to
be quite amusing, for some reason, but I was mostly trying to do them
in imitation of the teacher, who is quite naturally the discussion
leader most of the time.

I thought I did
pretty well, and so did the other group, which couldn't quite decide
between me and the Korean guy. “Rude Boy showed the most leadership
and did a good job at organizing the discussion, and drawing out
everyone's opinions,” they said, but the Korean guy “did the best
job of bringing those opinions together.” The teacher disagreed,
though he was torn, rather, between the Korean guy and the Chinese
guy, who “made the most conscious use of time,” i.e. talked
neither too much nor too little.

“But,”
he said, “Rude Boy did clearly lead the discussion, and he did a
good job. So if he'd been a little less concerned about expressing
his own opinions and spent a little more time listening to the
others, I'd have said he was the best.” I was startled. I thought I
had been listening to
the others! What must have happened, though, was that every time I
tried to indicate my comprehension of another person's viewpoint, I
did it by summarizing, and sometimes using what they said as a
jumping-off point into the next section. So the whole time, where I
thought I was being receptive and attentive, I was coming off as
forceful and self-centred! It really is tough to find that sweet spot
sometimes, isn't it? This is definitely something I'll have to watch
in the future, because from what I hear, being a team player is even
more critical in the Japanese corporate world than in the
English-speaking one, and I reeeeeally don't want to come off like I
don't play well with others. Still, at least I learned something.

About Me

I've been studying Japanese language and culture since 2004 and have twice studied abroad to Kyouto. Veterans can enjoy my pratfalls, and newcomers should be able to gain some insight into life here. Maybe.